


Traveler Returned

by Falcolmreynolds



Series: Stories of the Wide Sky Clan [3]
Category: Event of Exploration: Traveler Returning, Flight Rising
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:53:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26084512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Falcolmreynolds/pseuds/Falcolmreynolds
Series: Stories of the Wide Sky Clan [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768582
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Traveler Returned

_Three weeks,_ Windracer thinks, her heart sinking in her chest. _Three weeks today. Five weeks he’s been gone._

“My love,” Helios says, bumping his head against her side. “I know you’re thinking about him.”

Windracer sighs and nods.

“I can’t see the future, but I don’t think his story ends in tragedy,” Helios murmurs. “He’ll come back.”

“I hope so.”

* * *

It’s six weeks to the day since Satin’s disappearance when Gallica heads out onto the Plateau proper for some early flight and dance practice. She’s only out there for a few minutes before Ruval comes screaming in, her wings whistling in the wind, and crashes into the ground.

“Wow, okay, hello,” Gallica says, stepping back. “What’s _that_ about?”

“It’s Satin,” Ruval gasps, raising her head. “He’s at the northern border of the territory, flying in. Call Windracer!”

* * *

By the time Satin lands, Windracer’s there and so is a third of the clan, watching him anxiously as he coasts the last few hundred meters and backwings with _startling_ grace into the grass and ferns. He looks… tired. He’s missing a great deal of flowers and moths and his little collar is gone. He looks different. His tunic’s been patched up, too. He blinks around at everyone. “Hi,” he says, softly. “Um. Sorry I was - sorry I was missing. I, uh, I didn’t want - I didn’t mean to be.”

He’s also _not alone._ Ruval hadn’t mentioned that. Windracer stares. He’s got two _bogsneaks_ with him, and they’re… riding on his back?

“Yer favorite boy’s back!” one of them shouts, and blows a few notes on a cornet. _Oh, no. I’ve heard about that one from Larkspur. Who let him near Satin?!_

Satin looks down at the bogsneak, who can be none other than Ssare. “Hey,” he says, “that’s my mom, be nice.”

“An’ yer her favorite boy,” Ssare agrees.

“Satin,” she says, pushing her way through the small crowd to stand in front of him, “Where have you _been?_ ”

“Saving the world,” Ssare says, helpfully.

Is that so? “Really.”

“Aye,” Ssare says, “and if you’ve got any sensibility, you’ll give him a hero’s welcome!”

Satin closes his eyes and runs his head into the ground. “Ssare, please,” he says, voice muffled by the dirt and grass. “Please don’t.”

“I should tell ye all the story -”

_“Please don’t!”_

“Ssare,” says the other bogsneak, in a tone that is light, but that Windracer can hear is laced with warning. Ssare lowers the cornet he was about to doot.

Windracer sighs. “Thank you for bringing him back,” she says, to the bogsneaks. “Is there anything we can do for you? Do you need to rest before your journey home? I believe you’re acquainted with a few members of my clan already - Larkspur, and Duskrunner. You’re welcome to rest here for a bit before continuing on.”

That seems to also make Satin happy, she notices, because he picks his head up with his ears swiveled forwards. Huh. He must really like these two.

The bogsneaks - from Clan Spectral, it seems, and the one with the cornet is indeed the very same Ssare who allegedly so terrorized Larkspur during her journey a few years back - accept the invitation, and Windracer turns to Satin. She steps forward and extends one wing over him, pulling him close; he doesn’t resist, sitting down in the dirt with a thump and leaning against her. _Oof._ He’a big boy.

“What happened?” Windracer asks him, softly.

“I…” Satin pauses and takes a breath. “It’s, um, it’s a really… long story.”

“Summarize.”

He frowns at the ground. “Salt was dying,” he says, “but she couldn’t die right because Marius was trying to steal her power, so she called in a bunch of dragons to help after putting people through time loops for months. Oh - how, how long has it been?”

“Six weeks.”

Behind him, Ssare makes a startled sound and engages in a quick discussion with Thalla. “Wasnae six weeks for me,” he grumbles, when he looks back to the Wide Sky dragons.

“No, it was only three for you, right?” Satin says, and looks to Windracer, alarmed. “I, um, what… what happened?”

Thalla hmmms to herself. “Temporal Scattering. Time is different for Salt, right? So it’s likely no one was taken simultaneously.”

Satin grimaces - not flinches, ‘cause otherwise he’d scare his moths with his sudden movement. “Oh,” he says. “Well, that’s… kind of good?” he says, after a moment. “I-it was four months for us.”

“Four _months -”_ Windracer draws in a sharp breath, then carefully lays her head against his neck, a comforting gesture. “I’m sorry. I won’t rush you. Go on?”

“Right. Um. Well. We… all ended up in a, a chunk of desert. Oh, it was me and, um, twenty other people? Almost? There were a lot of us. But we, we ended up in the desert, and then Timias showed up -” he catches his breath and narrows his eyes. But, wait, no, that part of the story doesn’t come yet. “And he apparently didn’t know what was going on either. So we started looking around. Um, well, basically, there was this tower, and it - it k… it killed six of my friends. And that was. That was really bad! But then they came back when the time loop reset.”

 _The what. By the Eleven, this poor boy…_ Windracer listens to his big heartbeat while he speaks.

“Uhh, and then we… well, I - I don’t really know how, but over a bunch of we figured out that, um, that Salt was dying and needed help finding her new vessel for her Passage to be complete and we found out that Marius killed his own son and stole his body and Timias wasn’t TImias he was Marius and then we found out that he was trying to steal Olga’s body too - uh, Olga’s the new vessel, the new Sky - because he wanted Salt’s power and she kept resetting time so that he couldn’t do it, and then - and then, uh, we, we tried to save Olga but it. It didn’t work the first time.” He goes silent for a moment and shivers. “We, um, it didn’t work. We couldn’t save her. But then time reset again so we could save her and we did even though, uh, Manfred got really hurt, and Marius stabbed me, and then I… don’t know what happened but -”

“Stabbed you?!” Windracer draws back immediately and starts to look him up and down. “Where? Is it healed at all? Are you alright?”

“No, no, I’m okay now,” Satin assures her hurriedly. He twitches aside a fold of his tunic to reveal a thin, pale scar on one side. “Erin healed it for me. But after that, um, well that was after I made the veil, and did the, the thing, and before that Ssare had done the -”

There’s a minor commotion at the cavern entrance - a deep iridescent purple-black pearlcatcher hurrying out, her pearl in a sling around her neck, looking concerned. Following her is a brightly colored coatl - it’s Myrial and Python, two of the clan’s strongest mages.

“Windracer,” Myrial says, and catches sight of Satin. She looks him over, then beckons to Windracer. “There’s - welcome back, Satin, can you hold right there for a moment, please?”

Satin blinks. “Oh,” he says, “can you sense her too?”

Myrial goes dead quiet. She stares at him. “Sense who, Satin?” she asks, her voice very carefully gentle and calm. Behind him, the bogsneaks exchange a glance.

“I - I was about to get to that part,” he mumbles, tucking his face down against his throat. “I was nearly there.”

Myrial and Python exchange a glance. Python peers at Satin closely - the imperial shifts, knowing he’s being magically stared at - and withdraws, fluffing his feathers up. “Very well,” he says, “go on. I want to see exactly what it is that’s made such a, hmm…”

“I know, I know,” Satin says, lowering his head. “And it was probably really silly to let - but I had to! I had to, or, or…”

“Back up,” says Windracer, confused. “What’s going on?”

“There’s something in your boy here,” Myrial murmurs. “Literally.”

Tales of Guests flash through Windracer’s mind. She looks back to Satin. “Not the Guests,” she says, remembering what Larkspur said about them. “Not the -”

“No! Like, an entity.”

“An outer god,” Thalla adds, calmly.

A… what. Windracer blinks. She sits back down beside Satin. He doesn’t feel any different to her, but… she’s not the greatest with magic. “Well, go on,” she says to him. “I’m sorry for the interruption.”

“I, well, back at the start, Ssare was trying to contact Salt and it didn’t work and he didn’t know why. So he decided to contact a _different_ one of the outer gods to see if it would work, so he picked the nicest one, Stone, but Stone wouldn’t really like him as a ritual person, or, or something? And I was just waiting outside the Tower for my friends -” his voice goes a bit choked here, but he shakes his head and moves on - “so he… asked me to do it. And it, it wasn’t a big ritual! It was just asking Stone to help protect my moths. And then she… did.” He raises a claw and huffs out a bit of breath, and a moth leaps from his flower crown to his outstretched paw. Windracer peers at it - it looks pretty normal, aside from being a little bit dusty.

“I’m too raucous, rude, an’ rowdy fer Stone,” Ssare points out. “And Satin, the way he is, Stone would never hurt him. He’s just too sweet.”

“Mm-hm,” Windracer says, critically. She looks Satin up and down. “And that’s it?”

“Yeah. Well - for then, yeah. But, but later, after the Tower and the, um, everything… well, I was at Olympus, and I had some spare time, so I, um, I drew a little circle on the floor and I couldn’t remember all the symbols or most of the words but I asked Stone if there was anything I could do to help her. And there was another one, or, at least Ssare told me there was?” Satin shoots a glance over at the bard. “But I can’t remember. It’s, um, it’s… a little foggy. A lot happened. A-anyway, the point is, uh, I kind of… let Stone into my head?” He presses his ears back against his skull, as if expecting a reprimand.

Windracer almost delivers on that. Almost. But instead she takes a breath and says, “keep going.”

“W-well, that was fine, and - um, I spent a lot of time flying around. A lot.” He raises one wing and looks at it. Windracer glances back too, and blinks - where previously he had been about an average imperial, he’s now got a heavy chunk of muscle there. He’s just as soft and round as he used to be, but now she can detect he’s at least got a good deal of flight muscle underneath his scales. Huh… well, alright.

“I - there was the Deadman’s Canal incident, and then there was the… _other_ Deadman’s Canal incident.” Satin actually does physically wince at that. “I, um, I need to talk to Burnish about that.”

The clan therapist. Windracer nods. It must have been bad. Ssare offers Satin a pat. Satin leans into it with a sad nod.

“But, then, later we were, um, we were saving Olga from Caldera again. And we - she, well, we did! We did save her. But, uh, Marius was. Marius was there. That was after Ssare and I went to talk to Merlin. Erin told us that one of our flares had gone off and we made it to the Tower where the flare was and then onward to Caldera, and we got there just as they were fighting him again to keep Olga away from him, so we kind of - well, we tried to get his soul out of the body with the cage Ereshkigal gave us but it didn’t work -”

 _Ereshkigal? Who’s that? They weren’t mentioned before. This boy is… well, storytelling isn’t one of his talents._ If anything, Windracer feels _more_ confused than she did before. She’ll wait ‘til he’s done, though.

“So, uh, we just let W attack him with the. The grenade launcher.”

_Oh, for the - who let a dragon with a grenade launcher near him?!_

“Um, he escaped though. And then while we were kind of resting I got this, uh… this…” Satin tips his head to the side and flicks his eyes up, as if trying to remember. “What would you call it?” he says, and for the first time, Windracer gets the _distinct_ impression that he is Not Talking To Her.

He sways side to side a bit, thinking. “A compulsion, I guess,” he says, after a moment. “To protect Ifrit.”

“Who’s Ifrit?” asks one of the crowd.

“Oh! She was a little hatchling who was at Caldera -”

_Not sure what Caldera is, and he hasn’t told us that either._

“- Uh, Marius was trying to… do something. He put a, a fire demon in her, or something? She was just a baby. Uh, she broke out with her moms though. Not her actual moms. They just kind of adopted her I guess. Silence and Saria. Ages ago. She was traveling around trying to get them both to be around her at the same time but the recursions were really making that had for them, ‘specially ‘cause only Ifrit could remember one to the next. She was really cute even though she learned how to swear and really liked that. Uh, but, anyway, she was a, a person Marius could use to, like, uh, take… Salt’s power? And Stone really likes her. So I felt like I had to… protect her. Make sure she was safe.” He looks down. “I had to. No matter what.”

“So I, um… I went looking for her with Orinda in the Kingdom of Topaz, but she wasn’t there. And then we remembered we had that stone Praeteri gave us that could contact her, so we used that, and then I went from Topaz across Olympus and Sornieth and the Canal in one day which was, uh. A. A lot of flying. It really hurt. But I - I had to get there. And we didn’t find Marius in the Canal and I couldn’t go any further so I went to sleep and when we woke up the Temple had appeared but Ifrit wasn’t there so we used the stone and she was getting chased by Marius so we went and found her and drove Marius off even though he’d been chasing them for two hours and he’d almost caught them and then I carried them to the temple and then we fought him and Olga did the whole Passage thing and - and then we turned him into a clam.”

_What._

Satin blinks. “It, um… it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when I say it like that.”

“It doesn’t,” Windracer agrees.

Satin slumps a little bit. “Darn it,” he mumbles. “I… I’m really tired. Can I, um…”

“How did you get back here? Last question, I promise,” Windracer says. _The poor boy. He’s exhausted…_

“Oh, Olga is Salt now, so she can just… do that. She put us - well, first we went to Olympus, and Ssare had gotten Timias back earlier in the cage Ereshkigal gave us, so we put him back in his body after Erin healed it. Then she sent us back to Sornieth after we said goodbye to him. But she put us all at Dragonhome. And, well, everybody else started - um, people started showing up? To collect everyone else, but, well, we, we don’t have any seers, so I…” He slumps a little bit. “Nobody came from here, so Ssare and Thalla flew me back home. They didn’t want me to go alone. I mean. Relatively speaking.” He tips his head to the side again. “Technically.” Ssare mutters something Windracer can’t quite pick up, but she catches a few words; something about adoption? Satin closes his eyes for a moment. “Right,” he says. “With… you.”

 _Not directed at me again,_ Windracer thinks, with a slight frown. _He’s talking to that… entity. I’m not sure I like that._ “Well, alright,” she says, “it sounds like you had a very… interesting time.”

“Yeah, it… it was a lot,” Satin says, and looks down. His claws are dulled and slightly broken, Windracer can see - well-used. “I, um, I almost bit Marius once.”

“He was that bad?” Kuona, nearby, murmurs. “To get you to -”

“I know,” Satin interrupts, and then shuts his mouth with an audible thump. “I - sorry! I didn’t mean to -”

“It’s okay,” Kuona says.

“He, he - he killed Timias, who was his, who he adopted after Timias’ _own_ dad tried to kill him, and then Olga was his daughter, and he stole her body too, and… he was really bad.”

 _I’m going to find whoever put him through this,_ Windracer thinks, and has to stop herself from betraying these thoughts by grinding her claws through the soil.

“It’s okay though,” Satin says. “I, um… everything’s fine now. Salt has her new vessel and Olga’s all safe and she actually might come to visit? Because she always wanted to, to adventure, and stuff, and just couldn’t, because Marius was a bad person. But she might come here! Which is great.” He lays his head on the ground. “Can I… can I go sleep now?”

“Yes,” Windracer says, and sweeps out a wing; the crowd parts before her. “Come on. I’ll walk you back, and I won’t ask any questions. Ssare, Thalla, you’re more than welcome to rest here before going on.”

“Thank you,” Satin says gratefully. “Um - hey, don’t leave without saying goodbye,” he says to Ssare, before Windracer pointedly takes a few steps towards his caverns.

“Wasnae gonna,” Ssare replies, cheerfully. “Ye can’t get me t’leave yer life so easily!”

The walk to his caves is quiet. Windracer shoots a glare at anybody who tries to ask where he’s been - Historia can get the full tale from him later and relay it to others. The boy’s tired and needs rest. He’s been wounded, teleported, and traumatized, and he’s got a new god apparently hanging around in his head. 

When he sees his caverns, Satin almost collapses with relief. “I’m home,” he whispers, and sits down heavily, then lays in the center of the floor. Windracer almost tells him Mute took care of the silk he had dyeing, but by the time she looks down, he’s already asleep.

She pauses. “Hey, you,” she says, and he doesn’t stir. _Right. Good._ She straightens up. “You,” she says, addressing Satin’s new passenger. “Stone, right? That’s your name?”

She doesn’t hear anything, but even she, with her very limited magical sense, gets the idea something’s listening.

“Right. I’m as close to a mother as he’ll ever have. That’s my boy,” Windracer says, half-extending her wings, a threat display. “I’ve raised many hatchlings, and I doubt I’ll raise many more. He’s one of my children. If you bring him to harm - if you _ever_ hurt him - I don’t care if you’re a god, a demon, or something else. I will hunt you down, and I _will_ kill you for doing that to him. Do you understand me?”

A gentle breeze stirs the corners of the room, whipping up a bit of dust.

Windracer narrows her eyes. “I mean it,” she growls. “You may exist in a realm outside my own. But I’m not too old to learn how to find you. Your vessel, or whatever it is. I will do it. You treat Satin right, or you’ll have me to deal with.”

Another breeze. Windracer gets the distinct feeling of gentle amusement, but also, strangely, of a respectful understanding.

“Good.” She folds her wings back in. She stands up, shakes herself off - there’s dust on her scales, somehow - and gives Satin one long look before she trots out of the room. She’ll tell Kers or someone to guard the door and make sure nobody bothers him.

When she’s gone, the room is still. Satin remains on the floor, out like a light, in a dappled pool of sunlight through one of the windows. A few moths flutter towards him from the walls and land on him, settling in his flowers. Mori pokes his head out and stares at them.

The moths swarm to their keeper. They missed him, they almost seem to say. They missed him so much! And now he’s returned!

Yes, he is a bit different. Yes, he has some interesting stories to tell, and yes, he’s got some stories to tell to _only_ the clan therapist, some things that make him even now twitch in his sleep, hurt or fearful. But he’s back.

He’s back.


End file.
